Bitcoin-Networked Tree of Wealth Vs. Fiat-Mechanical Pyramid of Poverty
Asher Idan Ph.D
“Bitcoin is a new kind of wealth, from the 22nd. Century, that by mistake appear in the 21st. century” Nick SAtoshi
1 From Turing to Satoshi: Beyond Aristotle’s logic and Euclid’s geometry.
2 Beyond Newton’s mechanism: From Faraday, Maxwell, and Einstein, to Satoshi Networkism
3 Beyond Darwin: Networks of of Memes, versus Mechanical Immanence of Genes
4 Hegel, Marx, Dirkheim: Immanence of Economics, Society, and Politics
5 The creative force of Bitcoin: Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault
6 The critique of the networked reason is a New Type of Thinking: Network Thinking, in the Style of Bitcoin, Facebook and Wikipedia
7 Further reading
Bitcoin, Math and Logic: Godel, Turing, and Satoshi
Kant assumed that Aristotle’s logic (fourth century BCE), Euclid’s geometry (third century BCE), and Newton’s physics (17th century) were finite truths. From these three fundamental theories he deduced his whole philosophy. A philosophy that to this day pierces most of the Anglo-Saxon (“analytical”) philosophy, and most of the Israeli academic philosophy.
Hegel, however, was the first to attack Kant’s position, admitting that he owed a huge debt to Kant. Hegel knew how to respect tradition, on which his entire revolution in philosophy is based. This attack is on all fronts: Hegel preceded Lubczewski (30 years) and Riemann (60 years) in understanding the need for post-Euclidean geometry. Hegel preceded Kantor (by 60 years) in understanding the need for post-Greek arithmetic by clarifying the concept of infinity (thus Hegel owed a growing debt to Leibniz, Newton’s contemporary). Hegel also preceded Frege (by 90 years) in understanding the need for post-Aristotelian logic.
We will now move on to see this in exact quotes from Hegel’s text:
Post-Euclidean Geometry: We find in the section “Historical Truth and Mathematical Truth” the following flash of the wave (Yuval, p. 131): “The clear defect of mathematical cognition … That they too could be stretched, and all this out of blind obedience, and only out of faith. “ This is exactly the weak point of Euclidean geometry, and the same wave was recognized by an entire generation before the first non-Euclidean geometries of Lubetzky and Gauss, and two generations before Riemann’s determination “through two points passes more than one straight line.
Post-Greek Arithmetic (Yuval, 134): “Mathematics does not give its opinion on the relation between the line and the plane: and when it compares the diameter of the circle with its circumference it encounters a lack of measurements, that is, something infinite.” This is the weak point of Greek arithmetic, which Cantor dealt with, using the concept of “different intensities of infinity.”
Post-Aristotelian Logic: Throughout the introduction to “Phenomenology of the Spirit” Hegel repeatedly points to the fact that the foundations of mathematics are extremely shaky, and the basic concepts in science that were supposed to be accurate and on a solid logical basis, full of intuitive expressions without any logical basis. This is the point from which Frege began, and then continued Hilbert, Goedel, and Turing, who showed that basic concepts like “proof,” “truth,” “derivation,” “analytical,” “synthetic,” and many others, are intuitive concepts trapped within a network. A complex of concepts that has never been established. Analytical philosophy since Frege tried to do so but remained within the paradigm of pre-network thinking.
Yuval, pp. 132–133: “The choices of this flawed consciousness, on which the pride of mathematics, in which it excels in comparison with philosophy, rest solely on the poorness of its purpose and the flawed nature of its raw material … that is, fixed and dead sentences. .
Exactly the equal sign, Mandelbrot, the father of fractal-iterative mathematics, attacked as soon as he introduced iterative mathematics, instead of static mathematics. The iterative mathematics that corresponds to the network space instead of the linear space, replaces the equation sign =, in the formula Z = Z ^ d + c, with the iteration sign that looks like an arrow,:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gKOB6spCb8.
Mandelbrot upgrades Turing by building a kind of “turing machine,” which is essentially a “social network of Turing machines,” with iterations constantly taking place between the machines, a kind of Robert Axelrod’s “iterative prisoner dilemma.”
Bitcoin and Physics: Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein and the alternative to Newton’s mechanics
30 years (one generation) after the phenomenology of spirit, we find the first embryonic ideas of the alternative to Newtonian mechanics and the geometry of Euclid. Around 1830, Lubzewski and Gauss introduced post-Euclidean geometry. Around the same time, Faraday discovers that in magnetic force, in contrast to mechanical force, the shortest section connecting two points is not the straight line but the curved line. Around 1860 Maxwell presents the magnetic fields not as particles but as waves. Einstein in 1905–1913, already shows that there is no material medium that transmits the electromagnetic force, but fields. These fields are the network that connects the entire universe. The network metric, as Barbashi discovered, is also not of straight lines, but of “wormholes” in the form of the servers or hubs of the network.
Bitcoin and Darwin: Networked immanence of memes, versus machine immanence of genes
Causality and purpose, do not allow for creativity. Because in causality the action is determined by what preceded it. Purposefully the reason is determined by what it is supposed to reach. Whereas in creativity, something new appears between cause and effect, between process and purpose. But what happens when the causes are random, as in random mutation-based evolution? After all, randomness can cause creativity! Therefore, an extrinsic causality such as mutations must be distinguished from an intrinsic causality such as a creation created from a synergy of existing components, that is, immanence. Because in immanence, extremely networked, complex phenomena appear, while in externality, meanly linear results appear.
The living phenotype and the cultural phenotype, are lifeless corpses (they are shells). The living genotype and the memotype, are unreal (they are unfulfilled plans). Only the unity of an organic genotype-phenotype, and a unity of a cultural memotype-phenotype, gives us the true entity.
Kant limited science as a method of studying the phenotypes (the phenomena) according to the limitations of pure reason, and left the genotypes and motifs, to practical reason.
Both Wittgenstein in the concept of his language games, and Quine in the concept of ontological relativity, and Kuhn in the concept of paradigms, and Foucault in the concept of epistems, are in fact talking about cultural phenotypes that are not completely comparable, or incommensurable. Popper and the empiricists, on the other hand, log, cut, one limb from a given phenotype (say a horse, or Newtonian theory), and criticize it from the perspective of another phenotype (say an eagle, or Einstein’s theory). Fayraband, emphasizes that a critique of a given new phenotype (Einstein’s theory at the beginning, say in 1905) in its embryonic stage, from the point of view of a strong and well-established adult phenotype (Newton’s theory at its peak), would not allow for any emergation in science. It is therefore against giving universal validity to both the method of refutation and the method of verification.
It is therefore better to talk about “scientific research programs” (Lakatush), that is, about different cultural phenotypes (different organisms) that coexist. According to Winch, mega-phenotypes (or what Blackmore calls “mem-plexes”), such as scientific culture and religious culture, can “talk to each other” if they know how to blend horizons dialogically. Is the reference to “horizontal inheritance” (in the sense of Voese), that is, to the mutual transfer of spiritual genotypes (from motifs) between the various phenotypes?
But while Darwin see linearity in the historical process (an evolution in which man is more developed than the ape, science is more developed than religion), post-Darwinist biology also sees regressions and parallel developments. This is similar to Foucault, who finds archeological fragments “in different layers”. This is similar to Hegel who sees magic, religion, science, and what comes after it, a denying continuity, of the kind of caterpillar, butterfly, and pupa.
But a problem arises here: how can one talk about ending a process in a networked world where everything is connected to everything? After all, every process that has ended is only a stage in a mega-process that has not yet ended. The answer is that these are sub-networks within networks, in a practical way. This is just as we notice the identity of a single leaf, and at the same time we notice the connection of the leaf to a stem that contains more leaves, and we notice the connection of the stem to the branch, and of the branch to the tree, and of the tree to the forest, etc., etc. This is the meaning of heterogeneous, qualitative multiplication in biology and culture, as opposed to homogeneous-quantitative multiplication in physics and formal logic.
What has been said here about complexes such as different scientific theories, or different religions, also applies to different modes of production such as: capitalism, socialism, feudalism, slavery, etc.
Thus, we have here a concrete whole which is the thing in itself of Kant’s. Because Hegel makes the static Spinozist object dynamic, and the static Kantian subject dynamic, he distinguishes within the bone three components: purpose, result, and cause. Isolation of the three components from the whole, makes them lifeless and corpses. He turns them into disassembled parts of a machine. The three components can be described anatomically, but not dynamically and vividly. The three components are sufficient for understanding physics through the methodology of formal logic and mathematics. But not sufficient for understanding the animal and consciousness in networked methodology. The result is the phenotype, the reason is the genotype in the Darwinian model. The purpose is the genotype in the Lamerican model.
The real subject matter is not exhausted in its purpose, but in the working of the matter out. Nor is the mere result attains the concrete whole itself, but the result along with the process of arriving at it. The purpose by itself is a lifeless universal, just as the general drift is a mere activity in certain direction, which is still without its concrete realization: and the naked result is the corpse of the system which left its guiding tendency behind it. (The English Version in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, p. 42)
This in itself, does not come to fruition in purpose, but in execution. Nor does the result express the concrete whole of the thing per se, which can only be expressed in the connection of the result to the process that created it. The goal itself is a lifeless universal, just as the cause itself is still without concrete fulfillment. And the result alone is the corpse of a system, which has left behind its deliberate tendencies.
According to Hegel, a body without a genome is a corpse. Only the combination of a genome (purpose or cause), with a body (result), gives us the living organism which is a networked complex. But Hegel develops it before Darwin, not about biological beings (genes), but about cultural beings (mems). This is further proof of Blackmore’s thesis that about three million years ago, memes dictated genes, and not the other way around. But the basic evolutionary algorithm is Hegelian, and it goes beyond the bounds of biology.
Bitcoin and Hegel, Marx, Dirkheim: Immanence of Economics, Society, and Politics
The network change is neither linear nor monotonous, nor continuous, but it comes in states of discontinuity, rupture, phase transition, tipping point. Following the organic metaphors of retinal logic, the transition between theories, or civilizations, or technologies, is sometimes like the chick that smashes the egg. The egg that was a condition for the development of the chick, becomes a barrier to its birth. For 21 days, the development is continuous and inductive. But on the 22nd day, the “Black Swan” (Taleb) appears, the rift and disengagement from the past are created, and the transition to a new life. The lightning and thunder, are a sudden result of a gradual process of networked accumulation in the clouds. This historical dialectic underlies Marx’s concept of revolution.
The network explanations are very good for understanding discontinuous changes, because the number of channels in which the revolution takes place, increases exponentially relative to the number of participants in the revolution, according to the Metcalfe Law. Thus both Gladwell and Barabashi, as well as the people of the Flocking doctrine, are used. The decisive step, is sometimes much larger than what is needed for change, and there is “over shooting”, because step N + 1, in an exponential series, is much larger than step N. (Yuval, p. 65). Non-continuous change is complex, non-linear (there is no simple relationship between cause and effect), chaotic, phase transition. In phase transitions, there is always a short phase of Einstein condence, or collective frenzy, or entanglement between all participants.
But after the discontinuous, state of demolition, the more continuous phase of reconstruction returns. The hatched baby begins to develop in the new environment outside the womb. There are cyclical transitions between gradual development in the Middle Eastern world (where the difference between the various stages of development can be described on a standard scale and in the Gaussian curve), and birth and fracture in an extreme world (where the difference between different stages of development is not described on a standard scale but on a particular curve). This is the difference between states of peace, states of revolution and war. Between normal science and revolutionary science according to Kuhn.
Extreme states of discontinuity appeared even after the French Revolution, when Hegel saw Napoleon with his own eyes in the city of Vienna in 1806. History up to 2011 was also prehistory, in two senses: the epistemological sense and the ontological sense.
Epistemologically, historical descriptions and theories, up to the advent of network science, have been able to metaphorically describe events of discontinuity in history, without understanding the network mechanisms that generate the historical discontinuities. Since the emergence of the understanding of the dynamics of networks, however, there have been descriptions and theories that can explain discontinuities of the revolution and war type, using network theory.
Ontologically, the events and historical processes leading up to the emergence of digital social networks were driven in both continuous and discontinuous situations by pre-digital social networks (paths of paths, networks of paper letters, family networks, etc.). But in digital social networks, “history amps” appear, in the form of the Shirky Law (the drastic increase in sharing capabilities between billions and themselves, compared to the limited sharing capabilities in the age of oral, writing, printing, and television), and in the form of Axelrod’s Law. Trust between billions, compared to the limited number of iterations both in terms of the number of cycles for a given group, and also in terms of the number of participants in a given iteration).
The Logic of the Network Construction Stage: Network history is emerging history, while pre-network history is reductionist history. Emerging history means that the new whole is on the one hand created from previous parts, but on the other hand is both large and different from the sum of its parts. A reductionist history means that a new whole uses new parts while discarding the old parts. Judaism is a reductionist religion because it wanted to erase all the signs of idolatry that preceded it. But Christianity and Islam are emerging religions because they were built on certain parts of the religions that preceded them. Modernity is a reductionist religion that wanted to erase the Middle Ages. Science wants to erase religions.
Network history dismantles the whole that was before it, but does not discard its parts, but reuses them along with new parts that did not exist before. Network history is both evolutionary and evolutionary. The genotype of the mosquito or monkey found in the human genotype was not discarded by evolution, but was re-used. However, this is not a one-to-one recycling, but the old one takes on a new meaning in the new network, and becomes iteratively a new one.
Reductionist history does not take into account human, personal or collective memory. So perhaps Judaism wanted to destroy Amalek from the ground up, men women and children, so that there would be no memory left of the previous system. Because memory is like a single grain of wheat left over from a field of millions of grains that have been destroyed. This grain can revive a huge field of wheat grains.
Therefore any new political idea or new scientific theory, which does not take into account the human memory of the rich past world (at least for now, richer than the embryonic world of the revolution), risks counter-revolution, or at least the inability to spread the idea of revolution. Think of the meager food that the Israelites leaving Egypt hated (from), compared to the wealth of food in Egypt. Think of the meager Torah (stone tablet and Ten Commandments) that the children of Israel coming out of Egypt received, as opposed to the rich and moving pagan rites that erupted in the act of the Golden Calf. While as we have seen, Marx emphasized discontinuity and revolution, Weber and Dirkheim emphasize continuity. Any revolution that does not incorporate elements from the past and tradition, ends in failure.
Memory turns any language into a metaphor. Because in every simple sentence like “3 plus 4, they are 7”, man does not think only of 3 abstract universals and not just 4 abstract universals, but has associations to 3 sheep and another 4 sheep, or to 3 cookies and another 4 cookies. The iterations between the associations thicken simple sentences. Formal logic and mathematics try to tame us to think without metaphors and without associations. It may work in logic classes and math classes, but it does not work in the economic and political realm, much less works in economic and politics in the age of social networks, where as we have seen the number of associations and iterations increases exponentially and in depth, exponentially.
The memory, is the one that does not allow the negation of negation to bring us back to the starting point, because you can not dip in the same river twice, because between the first and second time, the river flowed and changed. Thus between the subject and the object in the above sentence, time has passed in my memory, so in expressing a particular sentence twice, there are actually two different sentences, because of the memory that passed between the two different expressive actions of the same sentence. , We are actually starting a new sentence with a new theme.This is also the difference between the prisoner dilemma of formal logic, and the iterative prisoner dilemma of practical politics.
The question is whether a Turing machine that contains memory is a non-iterative physical entity that works according to formal logic, or because memory is an organic entity, or is a third entity.
To spread the revolution, one must face the memory challenge of the old world, as a rich world versus the poor embryonic world of the revolution. The richness of an old or new world is expressed in three components: the scope of distribution (Reach), the degree of content thickening (Rich), and the clarity and intelligibility of the form.
The seismograph of history, warning signs of the approach of discontinuity: breaking and dismantling the old world, earthquake, signs of disease and early symptoms even before the earthquake and disintegration.
“The loosening of the old world is evident only in a few scattered signs of illness, boredom and frivolity biting into the remnants left over from the old world, and there is an early and vague sense that heralds something else and different approaching.” (Yuval, p. 67).
The discontinuity also does not allow for a detailed understanding of the change, but only in very general, vague outlines, which only hint at different possible directions of development. This is a state of dynamic imbalance. The appearance of a component in the net can only hint at the structure of the whole net, just as it is difficult to predict from the seed of wheat what the stem and oats will look like, or just as it is difficult to predict from the kernel of the peach tree what the whole tree will look like.
Bitcoin and philosophy: Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault
New discoveries in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries shed new light on the philosophies of Husserl, Bergson, Dirkheim, Heidegger, and Levins. These are Kahneman’s discoveries about the relationship between the mind and intuition, the kind of neurological imaging (fMRI, PET), and especially the kind of study of the social networks of groups of people and groups of animals.
Descartes’ Cogito, later understood by Husserl, as an early and unconscious exercise in the phenomenological methodology of “putting in parentheses”. Descartes put the physical world in parentheses. This allowed him to ignore the physical world and concentrate on the inner world. It’s like when the sun stops shining brightly at night, the stars are revealed to us.
Even according to Bergson, the physical and practical world dazzles us from seeing the non-physical and impractical sides. Kant’s discovery of synthetic a priori is a continuation of Descartes’ development of “proto-phenomenology” because a priori synthetic theorems are neither empirical nor logical. They therefore do not belong to the empirical sciences like physics, biology and sociology. They also do not belong to the science of logic. They create a third type of science and a third type of research method. Not a synthetic-a posteriori method like the empirical sciences, nor an a priori analytical like logic. But an a priori synthetic like philosophy and mathematics.
Bitcoin as Dialectics is a New Kind of Thinking: Network Thinking, Facebook, and Wikipedia
The wave breaks the form of mathematical-logical thinking based on the sign of equality =, and in its place it places the sign of two-way equality [1], of the kind that Mandelbrot formulated in fractal thinking. Equality exists in mechanistic ontology, but in organic ontology (of the type of Aristotle, Leibniz, and Goethe) it does not exist. Hegel takes it all a step further, to a third type of thinking: networkistic ontology.
In fact immanent and evolving, there can be no concept of truth of the kind of logical truth (lack of contradiction), or empirical truth (adaptation of the concept to reality). Truth is not only a connection between two linguistically applicable or two thoughts as in logic, nor is it an epistemological connection between a linguistic has and empirical reality. But the truth is an ontological connection between the various components of the network, or between the degrees of inclusion of the network.
The truth of human cells is the organism called man. The truth of the ants is their nest. The difference between epistemological-linguistic exposure and ontological realization, fades in network thinking. The truth and the trust of Bitcoin as a currency, is the Bitcoin Network.
One level negates the other levels (as the butterfly denies the pupa), and at the same time one level also obliges the other levels by constituting itself through the levels below it (as the organism realizes itself through its cells). This is the profound meaning of replacing equality =, in the above two-way dynamic equality sign.
There is no perfect reality, but it is a reality in constant formation. Phase N sees itself as deceiving level N-1, but is also constructed using the level below it.
Descartes presented the thinking self as a finished thing. Kant disassembled the self and showed that it is not a fundamental particle but rather it contains the form of space and time and the categories. Spinoza presented the pantheistic non-universe as a finished thing. Hegel dismantled the God-universe and made it dynamic, showing it to be realized within periods and forms of human action throughout history.
Hegel’s view of man as discovering the external physical reality within his consciousness, does not entail idealism, if we understand the networked meaning of this view. Similar to the biology in which the concept of the ontogenesis (individual development) of the organism is accepted, as a repetition of the evolution of the general species (phylogeny), the same can be seen in Hegel’s ontology. However, this is not the biological-material network of genes, but the spiritual network of memes. The understanding and spiritual development of an individual given in a given period, can be a repetition of the understanding and development of humanity throughout history.
What appears to a particular individual as an original random discovery, can in a networked perception, be revealed to us or to the individual himself, as part of a larger whole of it. This is similar to a person who has never met his parents and attributes his qualities to himself, and then when he meets his parents and is surprised at how much he resembles them. Thus as we develop self-awareness of ourselves and awareness of the world around us, we find parts of the world outside of us within us, and vice versa. We are a component, a fractal, in a huge network that is becoming more and more exposed.
Notes
The phenomenology of the spirit deals with the dynamics of the evolution of the universe, society and man, from a network-revolutionary perspective.
Phenomenology, is the theory of phenomena or the science of phenomena. Just as biology is a living science, and just as sociology is a social science, and just as psychology is a psychic science. Through phenomenon theory, Hegel wants to explore the spirit. And what is spirit? Spirit refers to the cosmos, just as the soul refers to man. Why as a phenomenon? Because Kant, one generation before Hegel, divided the world into two areas: the realm of phenomena, which we can recognize through science and mathematics, and the realm of reality behind the phenomena, which man cannot explore, but he can recognize in other ways.
Hegel presents the human spirit as an evolving subject. A subject as different from the object of Spinoza (the object), and different from the static of Spinoza. He took the idea of subjectivity from Kant. This important book is not difficult to understand because it is vaguely written, but because it is networked, thus bringing a new form of logic and language. The meaning of every word and every sentence in this book, is related in many threads to sentences and other words.
The phenomenology of spirit strives to include within it the forms of spirit that precede it, not through their elimination, as science wants to negate religion and magic, but through seeing them as a necessary stage. God is the totality of the human spirit in its various forms and stages. This is how Hegel sees the profound meaning of Spinozist pantheism: God is not only everywhere, but in all forms of the human spirit, including science and heresy.
In the book there is a breaking of the concept of progress of the Enlightenment and of Kant. Because the wave stems from the fact that monotheism and science are not advances relative to idols. Monotheism downgraded matter and elevated spirit. Science did the opposite: elevated matter and downgraded spirit. Hegel returns to the pre-Socratic goddesses, and finds the deity everywhere: in daily life, in games, in food, in sex, in research.
The subjectivity of the substance has two components: a, the realization of what is with time. b, self-knowledge. The realization of being occurs through negation, just as the growth of the organism constitutes a negation of its previous forms: the pupa deceives the larva, and the butterfly deceives the pupa. But this is not negation in the sense of removal, but negation in the sense of “going beyond.” Self-knowledge and self-awareness, are the awareness of denied forms. (I am like an onion).
Further reading
Hegel G.W. 1806, The Phenomenology of Mind, Harper, N.Y
Hegel G.W. 1806, Introduction to the Phenomenology of the Spirit, Translated by Jeremiah Yuval
Bergson H. 1889 Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, tr., F.L. Pogson, Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company, 1910.
Bergson H. 1902 Matter and Memory, tr., N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer, New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Bergson H. 1907 Creative Evolution, tr., Arthur Mitchell, New York: Dover, 1998.
Heideger M. 1927 Being and Time. Joan Stambaugh, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996
Husserl E. 1931 Cartesian Meditations. trans. D. Cairns, Dordrecht: Kluwer 1988